That President Lincoln was assassinated watching the play adds an extra macabre dimension to its interest. Sothern improvised the role of Lord Dundreary to such effect that his performance became the rage on both the British and American stage. Tom Taylor's Our American Cousin became a star vehicle by default when E. Dion Boucicault's The Corsican Brothers starred Charles Kean as telepathic twins and featured the famous stage-effect of the Corsican-trap. In Buckstone's Jack Sheppard, a spectacular and popular adaptation of Ainsworth's much dramatized novel, the rascal hero was played by the comedienne Mary Keeley. Each achieved its greatest fame through the talents of a particular star performer. His contributions to degenerationism have been wholly overlooked even though his notion of the “melting pot” was almost certainly the theory of ethnicity with the most traction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.Trilby and Other Plays is a new selection of English plays that had wide success on both sides of the Atlantic. Since Zangwill's death in 1926, literary critics have paid him scant attention. This essay examines Trilby (1894) in conjunction with The Master (1894), a novel by the most important British Zionist of the late nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill. Yet what this essay reveals is that art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism were, in fact, intimately connected in the late nineteenth century, and that this not only influenced literature, it also shaped its reception. On the rare occasions it has been touched upon, it has most often been subsumed under the banner of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism or connected to Du Maurier's anti-Aestheticism. Despite the good doctor's critical insight, Trilby's deployment of degenerationist discourse has often gone unnoticed.
could have given us a more comprehensive or more lucid study of the subject. the well digested results of a careful as well as discriminating study. . . “ Trilby is a masterpiece when viewed in the light of a study in heredity,” he announced in the pages of Practical Medicine in 1895.
0 kommentar(er)
